The RotoWire 200: Mid-May Update

Jeff Erickson is a co-founder of RotoWire and the only two-time winner of Baseball Writer of the Year from the Fantasy Sports Writers Association. He's also in the FSWA Hall of Fame. He roots for the Reds, Bengals, Red Wings, Pacers and Northwestern University (the real NU).

Doing a midseason set of rankings is tougher for me than all of the offseason/spring training rankings. How much emphasis do you put into a player's start, good or bad? I think it's human nature to want to believe in a player's breakout if you were already optimistic about him, and easier to be dubious if you weren't convinced beforehand. But if you do that, you miss out on the breakouts like Jose Bautista or Cliff Lee. I think that phenomenon is true on the downside as well - while many players aren't lucky and eventually "return to the mean," others stay unlucky and yet others fall off the cliff entirely. Another problem is that there are more injuries to account for, and putting a value on the player's absence becomes more difficult, especially given how often we're dealing with imperfect information on those injuries. Because of those factors, and because I frequently question how valuable in-season overall rankings are, I've resisted doing this exercise in-season. But there's been at least some demand from our readers to do a midseason set of rankings, so here we are. Once again, this list presumes a 5x5, 12-team mixed league that starts two catchers and does not have an innings-cap. There is a positional scarcity component applied for catchers and a lesser boost for shortstops. I'm setting these rankings as if I were drafting anew today - anything that the player has already done, through Sunday, would not count in such a hypothetical league.